Google deletes millions of fake and incentivised ratings from the Play Store

Google is planning on removing all the app reviews which are considered as fake or incentivized.

Like fake news is plaguing the world, the Google Play Store is also plagued by a lot of Fake reviews/ratings which tend to boost the popularity of random apps. Some apps make fake bots that provide positive reviews of their apps to make it top rated on the Play Store.

Google Play Store Logo.

Just like it did with fake YouTube subscribers last week, Google is planning on removing all the app reviews which are considered as fake or incentivized. The latter happens when some apps offer the user some kind of incentive or discounts if the app is given five stars on the play store. Google is already acting out on these fake reviews.

As of last week, millions of reviews and ratings were detected and removed from the Play Store using AI, human intelligence and machine learning. Google is using a team of engineers and analysts whose job is to "closely monitor and study suspicious activities in Play's ratings and reviews, and improve the model's precision and recall on a regular basis."

How much of it will actually weed out the trusted reviews/ratings from the fake ones is anyone's guess.